


Buckaroo Banzai and the Floydada Scuffle

by Vehemently



Category: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (1984)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:30:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1631612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Destiny bursts into a diner, and hijinks are the result.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buckaroo Banzai and the Floydada Scuffle

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my two cheerleaders on this effort, Cofax and Snacky.
> 
> Written for missmollyetc

 

 

_Searle, Aloysius Bastrop. Declassified Personnel File by Reno Nevada._

The thing you need to know is, before Rawhide was Rawhide, he was getting himself expelled from Texas Eastern Community College for reinventing calculus from scratch. Turns out they don't like that in Composition 101. I told him he should have majored in math, but Rawhide listens to three people: Rawhide, Rawhide's momma, and Buckaroo Banzai.

So there was young Aloysius -- that was his name back then, Aloysius B. Searle, so everyone called him Al -- leaving the college behind him, and the city of Fort Worth as well. He struck out north and west, into the high plains, the land of John Wayne and stickleburrs and plenty of empty fields to stall out in when your vintage 1956 Buick gives up on its radiator. It was a sweet car, the big round kind like a dining car on an old train, and painted maroon. Young Al wasn't going to leave his lady behind, so he stayed with her till the sun went down, and camped out on her roof that night.

It is a little known fact that Rawhide has discovered a comet and two moons. There's an asteroid just outside of Mars that would bear his name, only he didn't allow his name to be published at the time on account of being in the Hong Kong Cavaliers. So they named it Bob instead, and that's its name still. You can look it up in any star chart.

Anyway, Al spent the night lying on the roof of his car, listening to the hooting wild creatures and with his eyes on the sky as it wheeled. He got to know those stars, as you can't do when you just glance up at them after taking out the trash. Out there, where it's practically desert, where there's nothing else to do after dark except spit and hope that sensation on your ankle isn't a snake cozying up for warmth, he observed the constellations and developed some fundamental theories that astronomers are only beginning to understand today. And then, he met Buckaroo.

It was the pearly morning before dawn, and Al was in dreamland, wrapped in Army-surplus blankets on top of his beloved Buick (he called her Deedee), when a funny noise awoke him from his slumber. It was a high-pitched grumble of an engine, not like a car at all but something small like a weed-whacker or a remote-controlled airplane. Well, Al unwrapped those blankets from his head and wiped the dew off his face and what did he see but a contraption that looked like a giant tricycle. Only instead of pedals and chains it had lawnmower parts and model-airplane parts and lots of other parts lashed to the frame, all cobbled together into a strikingly smooth and elegant whole. And in the middle of it was a young man with a thick head of black hair and a giant pair of goggles on.

Al watched for a long while, cause you can see awful far in that part of Texas, and there's not much else to look at. As the sky lightened up behind him, the kid on the tricycle motored right on up to the maroon Buick on the edge of that empty field, and turned off the puttery little engine, and yanked his goggles down around his neck. "Engine trouble?"

"Yep," said Al.

"Maybe that's why I'm not finding any cars to hitch with," said the young man, who was of course our own Buckaroo. "I set out to hitchhike across America, but when there aren't any cars on the road you make pretty slow progress."

"I reckon," said Al. He noticed, all of a sudden, that the tricycle contraption didn't smell like motor oil, but kind of like french fries and popcorn. He scratched his head. "You build that yourself?"

"I threw something together," said Buckaroo with a shrug. "Fella back in Roaring Springs had a blowtorch he let me borrow, and the rest was kismet. My name's Buckaroo Banzai, by the way."

"That's your name?" asked Al, who had never even heard the word _banzai_ outside of Hollywood movies about parachutists. Now, you've got to realize, at this time in history, the famous Buckaroo Banzai was nineteen years old, and famous only for having won spelling bees in three languages. So it wasn't strange that a private citizen would not recognize him by sight. 

Al considered in that big-jawed way of his, and then he admitted, "I guess I got twin uncles called Blue and Beyond. And a grandma named Myrtle."

"All grandmas are named Myrtle in their hearts," said Buckaroo.

Al got down off the top of Deedee the Buick, and folded up his Army blankets. "I'm Aloysius B. Searle," he said, already dazzled. He shook Buck's hand. "Late of Texas Eastern and suffering a serious dispute with Deedee's radiator."

"I majored in conflict resolution," Buckaroo told him. (Which is true; he has a certificate.) "Let's see what we can do."

In an hour they'd fixed up Deedee just fine, and off they went together, with the tricycle lashed to the roof. They rode with the dawn at their backs. And as two young people on the road will do, especially when they're far out enough the only radio signal they get is a couple of mariachi stations and the weather, they fell to talking.

Buckaroo was headed westward on a pilgrimage. I don't know why he decided to make it a hitch-hiking pilgrimage, except if he hadn't he wouldn't ever have met Al. He told the unclassified version about how his parents had died in an engineering accident in the western desert, and how he wanted to see the place again, now he was big enough not to be picked up and carried out of danger. Al gave that the quiet it deserved, till they were near up on the tiny town of Dougherty. Wasn't even really a town, just an old railroad junction -- and I think the trains are long gone -- a gas station, a general store, and like that. They see the first houses and they've been sitting there side by side not-talking, and suddenly Al blurts, "I could take you all the way where you're going, if you want."

He didn't know he was going to say it till it was already out his mouth. Buckaroo Banzai has been known to have that kind of effect on people. But the truth was, Al wasn't headed much of anywhere except for away from Texas Eastern. Buckaroo looked him up and down, over there in Deedee's driver's seat, and said, "Only if it's not out of your way."

And by the time he'd said that, they were through Dougherty and back into the country, just crops on all sides with little reservoirs and water-pumps for the irrigation and every once in a while a parked tractor standing up out of the cut-down stalks and stems, like for punctuation. There wasn't much explaining Al could do about his recent disagreement with institutions of higher learning, and anyway there wasn't much needed. They talked about Buicks and about stars and about what kinds of hair products can counteract the dry desert air. They didn't have maps, just headed onward, and it wasn't too long before they came up on the next evidence of live humans, namely, the town of Floydada, Texas (population 3,126).

Seat of Floyd County, by the way, and home of the Floydada Whirlwinds. Last year the Whirlwinds' record was 1-11, but you aren't allowed to be a county seat in upper Texas without a highschool football team. It's the law.

Al directed Deedee into a parking space on Main Street, a dusty old set of storefronts that was not exactly looking too good, business-wise. But there was a diner front and center, big windows painted with tornadoes and GO WHIRLWINDS on the door, in green and white. So Aloysius B. Searle and Buckaroo Banzai, they went out to breakfast.

The first thing is, once they settled into the orange Naugahyde benches and before they're even handed menus (if there were any menus), is that Buckaroo asked himself, "I wonder if they have miso here?"

"What's miso?" said Al, whose familiarity with international breakfast traditions was lacking at that time in his life. He looked around at the plates on other people's tables: stuff drowned in ketchup, or Tabasco, or gravy, but all of it stuff he's got names for. "If it's grits, then probably. Eggs, bacon, sausage? Oh, I bet they got pancakes."

Buckaroo just smiled at him. "I can do pancakes. Miso's a kind of soup."

"Soup for breakfast?" Al laughed.

"Yeah. I bet you'd like it." The waitress came by then, in a little blue waitress outfit with a white apron, and smiled at these two strange boys in her diner. Her name was Anita Figueroa, and she was a 45% owner of the place, and in another year or two she'd have saved up enough to buy a majority percentage, but that's nothing to do with our two friends. She just genuinely liked to see strangers, because except for being in highschool or watering soybeans, there was not a whole lot to do in Floydada. Al and Buckaroo ordered their breakfasts and waited for her to leave before resuming their conversation: "Say, have you ever been to Hong Kong?"

Al just shook his head. "Buck, we go to Los Alawhatsits like you're hoping to and that's the first time I ever left the sovereign confines of the state of Texas." He looked around the room, at the hardware store clerk having a biscuit on his break and at the pesticide salesman tucking into a pile of hash browns. "I had thoughts about a trip to Mexico once, but something came up and I spent the weekend learning how to barbecue instead. That was when I was twelve."

"Who'd you learn it from? Barbecue, I mean."

"Why, my grandma Myrtle. You aint a man till you've learnt to barbecue, she always said, and she said it to my momma and my sisters same as me."

"Hm," said Buckaroo. "Lots of men in the Searle family."

"And beautiful, courtly men they are." 

It made Buckaroo laugh to hear it, and it made Al laugh to watch him laugh. And then Buckaroo stopped laughing and trained those laser-sharp eyes on Al and said, "So if I asked you along, would you go to Hong Kong? My foster-father wants me to look up a couple of colleagues of his and talk particle physics."

Al leaned back on his side of the table to think. "Ho-lee shit," he said, that slow way he has.

That wasn't exactly an answer, but Buckaroo didn't mind too much; he ate his pancakes and generally had a fine breakfast while Al pushed the grits around on his plate without talking. When they were done, he thanked Anita and paid for their breakfast in two-dollar bills.

"Wait, I can --" Al was saying, with his hand on the wallet in his back pocket, but he didn't get to finish that sentence before a girl busted in the front door and started shouting.

This was a long time ago, you have to remember, long time before the World Crime League made itself known to humanity and the Hong Kong Cavaliers walked around armed as a matter of course. Al did not have any firearms experience beyond using a pellet rifle on the rabbits that got into his momma's prize-winning pole-beans, and there's a point when you grow up and hand down your pellet rifle to your nephews and nieces. So not only did Al just stand there with his mouth open in surprise, he didn't have a weapon he could pull even if he'd known what to expect.

"They gone wild!" the girl cried, while the door's bells were still a-jangle. She stood there in a short green skirt and a white cotton sweater with F picked out on it in green. "Holy cow the team's gone wild!"

At once Buckaroo took over. "What team?" he asked as he grabbed the girl by the shoulders. "Where have they gone?"

"The football team. Somebody's got in their brains and messed 'em up bad," she gasped. She shook all over. Anita rushed up, since she was Anita's niece and all, but Buckaroo stayed right on her. When the man is looking at you, you suddenly remember every little detail. That's how it is with him. "All of 'em at once, up and walked away. Nobody was gonna get in their way, you know? But they just gone on down the hall to the principal's office and walked in and locked the door behind."

It should be said that Al played football in highschool, seeing as how he went to highschool in Texas. So of all the people in that diner, he had a pretty good idea of team hijinks. He put his hands on his hips in an annoyed way, but what the girl said next stopped him cold.

"There was screaming." She whispered it, like a secret, and then she whooped it. "There was screaming! And they come out and it was blood all over. On their faces. They didn't even smile. They were moaning and coming at us all and I ran away to get the cops."

"Well we're not cops," said Buckaroo, with a tilt of his head and that famous half-smile, "but I guess we'll do. Al, I'm going to need everything out of Deedee's trunk. Anita, make sure the cops know, will you?" Anita dashed back behind the counter for the phone. "And see if they have any tranquilizer darts. No point in killing them if we don't have to."

Anita's niece, whose name was Destiny by the way, well she just stood there on the linoleum shaking with the mascara her mother wouldn't have let her wear (if she'd known) in streaks down her face. She had on those little white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with the little pompoms on them, you know? Right at the back of the ankle. Buckaroo glanced at her. "So you're a cheerleader?"

"Phone line's cut," Anita reported, and knocked over a coffee cup with her trembling. The coffee went all over the counter and onto the floor.

Al busted back into the diner quick as a jackalope, with his toolbox and jumper cables and the suitcase with all his clothes in it. That last had been in the trunk, and Buckaroo said everything, so Al brought it, though he could not think of a reason why rampaging teenagers would require his less-than-clean tube socks. He dashed it all to the floor in front of Buckaroo, who was standing there with his hands in his pockets waiting calmly for Destiny to answer.

"Yeah," Destiny said at last, through her sniffles. She took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah, I just made the team."

"Hey, that's great," Buckaroo said, and meant it. "And that means you know all the football players, right? And who lives where and who they're related to?"

"I guess. What --?"

"We're gonna need some squirt guns. Where can we get squirt guns in a town like this?"

Anita was whipping a rag back and forth over the counter, not so much mopping up the spilt coffee as flinging drops of it everywhere. "Hardware store right down the block. Eugenio?"

The hardware store clerk had been sitting there this whole time, at the counter, with the crumbs of Floydada's finest biscuits spilling down his t-shirt. It was only when Anita called his name that his jaw twitched, moved, and he got back to the chewing he'd left off a minute or so before. "Yeah," he said at last, spewing more crumbs. "We got a bunch."

Buckaroo Banzai has never had difficulty delegating. "You," he pointed at Eugenio's forehead. "Go and fetch me ten or fifteen squirt guns, empty. And some rope. Go now. Okay, Anita? You got a big jug of Tabasco in the back? And all the tinfoil you can find." Away they ran.

All of this Al watched, breathless still. "You gonna shoot Tabasco at 'em?" he asked, baffled.

"In the eyes, up the nose, it's an irritant." Buckaroo dug into the toolbox. "It'll slow them down. Do you have any road flares?"

"No? Buck, what the hell is going on?" 

Buckaroo stood up grim, that little determined line between his brows. "If it's a contaminant in the water supply, it should be all over town. No, it's got to be mind control. Either way, the Whirlwinds don't know what they're doing, so we don't want to kill them. Hey, kid --" by this he meant Destiny the cheerleader, "--take this napkin and write down the players' names and addresses. Start with the ones right in town."

"Addresses?" asked Al. He hefted a wrench, and tried to think about knocking some poor dumb kid on the noggin with it. "Why that?"

"Where does a zombie go?" said Buckaroo. "Home, that's where."

"Oh," said Al, and followed him out the door.

The pesticide salesman was still at his table, the hash browns getting cold on the plate in front of him.

Things came together pretty quick after that. Ten or twenty of the highschool kids (there are only 250 kids in the whole school) had gone running down Main Street from the highschool, including the sheriff's daughter, and the sidewalk was full of people asking each other what in the Sam Hill was going on. Buckaroo walked right up to the sheriff's wife Maureen McClink (Sheriff McClink was off someplace north of town, looking into a report of two rival pumpkin-farmers smashing each other's merchandise) and handed her a Tabasco-loaded squirt gun. "Don't let anybody kill them," he told her.

To say that she stared was a bit of an understatement. At that moment, Buckaroo had just finished molding a tinfoil helmet around Al's huge cranium, to match his own. If you've ever met Rawhide, you probably know that he looked like some kind of terrifying curly-haired robot with his head all shiny like that, a terrifying robot in dusty jeans and a lariat necktie. "What's this for again?" he asked, not a little self-conscious.

"Protection against radio waves," Buckaroo explained. He handed off the roll to Destiny the cheerleader, who was standing there with the list of football players in her hand. She was in the hiccupping stage of crying, which is really pretty well near done, so when Buckaroo said, "Trade you," and took the list out of her hands, she just nodded and hiccupped. And started making her own helmet, carefully sculpted around her perky little ponytail.

And that was about all the prep time they were going to get, because the Floydada Whirlwinds (all 22 of them) and their assistant coach came storming down Main Street just then, led by the wide receivers running a post pattern. If their Coach could only see, he would have been proud at how they moved, like a single body that just happened to be in 23 pieces, no doubt or hesitation or even the need to look at each other. But Coach couldn't see, because he was barricaded in the girls' locker room back at the highschool, with the history teacher and 33 hysterical sophomores, ready to go down fighting with a mop in his hands.

So it was up to Buckaroo and Al and Anita and the townspeople in the street, plus Sharon who lived above the hair salon and had a big collection of stone paperweights lined up on her windowsill ready to throw. "Stand your ground, people," Buckaroo called, and the truth was, they could, because they stood with him and he showed no sign of wanting to run away. Al held a neon-green squirt gun in his hand and squinted into the morning sun over Buckaroo's shoulder and took aim at the receiver running towards him -- and fired.

Let's just say that I would advise against applying Tabasco to the soft and moist parts of the body in high concentration. The screaming was impressive. Six direct hits (two of them in the eyes), and the receivers were writhing on the pavement, helpless. Anita burst into tears, but she went on shooting, and Destiny crawled between her legs to tie up each Whirlwind the minute he was out of action. You wouldn't think a cheerleader from upper Texas would be able to tie so many sailor's knots, but you would be wrong.

The trouble was, squirt guns don't actually hold all that much liquid at a time: they were running out of ammo. Cornerbacks were coming on strong, and linemen, and the nose tackle right in the center, as was proper. Only he was snarling (he was a house-sized boy named Delbert Minkins) and he rushed right on up to tear out Buckaroo's throat with his bare hands. It was about this time that Al was exceedingly glad he had that wrench in his back pocket, because he did exactly what it was he'd been hoping not to do, that is, he clonked Delbert Minkins on the noggin with it, and dropped him cold.

Buckaroo spared a glance for the small mountain of Whirlwind at his feet. "Good arm," he said. He shook his squirt gun to ascertain it was empty and tossed it over his shoulder to Eugenio, who had the jug for refills.

"Yeah," shrugged Al, abashed. "You think he's okay?"

"How about you keep that wrench handy and you keep by me. Come on."

Pitched battle broke out all over the street, with missiles made out of hairbrushes (the circular kind, that really sting when they hit you in the face) and spatulas and wet towels and those rock paperweights from Sharon in the second story window. The Whirlwinds were not so mind-controlled that they could not come in out of the rain, if you know what I mean, and that was the cause of all the trouble, in the end. The quarterback and a couple of his defensive line took refuge behind a black Ford Gremlin on the far side of the street, and somebody threw what later turned out to be a screwdriver at their location. That was a cleverly placed screwdriver I have to say, because it scored a direct hit on the Gremlin's gas tank, and punctured it neatly. Gasoline spilled out all over the street and made a mess everywhere.

Now, I am not saying for sure that this was a roundabout attempt to assassinate Buckaroo Banzai. At that point in history, Hanoi Xan was not recruiting for his World Crime League within the United States. But what I am saying is, that was the only screwdriver thrown in the whole Floydada Scuffle, and it managed to puncture the gas tank of a subcompact car.

The smell of it wafted over everybody, and even the Whirlwinds backed away. There was a pause just then, as everyone sort of waited for it to blow up, because they've all seen the movies and that's what happens, right? Well, gasoline doesn't light itself on fire, not even as the result of a malicious screwdriver, so while everyone was sort of staring and waiting, Buckaroo rifled through his pockets as a way of thinking through his next step, and what should he find in the breast pocket of his jacket but a tuning fork. He tapped it on Al's tinfoiled head and it rang faintly.

"Say, do you like music?" he asked Al.

Nice as you please, Al took Buckaroo by the shoulder and pulled him another couple of steps away from the spreading pool of gas. "I don't know. I guess I can plunk out a tune or two on a honkytonk piano. You?" he added, to be polite.

"Yes," Buckaroo muttered, but he was no longer listening to Al. "Don't do that," he said. Still facing the punctured black Gremlin, he could see what the others had not noticed: that Maureen McClink, the sheriff's wife, had lost her head and found her shotgun. She strode up the street like an avenging angel in her second-best dress and her town-shoes, and pumped the shotgun one-handed. Buckaroo said louder, "Ma'am, please don't do that. Ma'am, _ma'am_ \--"

But Maureen was on a tear, and anybody from her quilting circle could have told you that Maureen on a tear can't listen to anybody. Buckaroo gave up talking and dashed across to stop her, Al on his heels suddenly comprehending the danger. "No no no no no," they shouted together.

Buckaroo was in time to knock the shotgun down, so that she didn't kill any of the Whirlwinds. But what she did do was send sizzling shot into an open pool of gasoline. And as you might expect, a spectacular whump of fire was the result. Just like in the movies, only louder and the shockwave knocked over just about everybody and shattered four or five plate-glass windows.

Al wound up with his arms over Buckaroo, and the both of them were tangled with Maureen and with her shotgun. That gas fire roared and groaned and dominated the street, so much so if you had tapped Eugenio on the shoulder and asked him what was going on he would have forgotten to mention the mind-controlled Whirlwinds entirely.

Those Whirlwinds were suddenly less of a concern, after all. The ones on the near side of the fire were blind from Tabasco sauce, or tied up, or both, and the ones that weren't were on the far side, unable to attack. Because as mind-controlled as they were, they weren't stupid. Even zombies don't walk through fire. They muttered at each other, the fire red on their faces and crisping their hair, and began to turn away.

Destiny the cheerleader dashed over to the doorway where Al and Buckaroo huddled. "My god, you're killed!" she cried, but even as she did they unbent their limbs and got to moving. Al had taken the worst of it, being on top, and the left side of his jaw was a mass of tiny cuts from the glass that had fallen everywhere.

(Although he will deny it if you ask him today, that is the reason Rawhide doesn't shave. He finds that he presents a less-alarming figure when his scar tissue is difficult to discern.)

But that was the worst of it, that and singe-marks on the wrists of Buckaroo's jacket, from the shotgun blast. He gave Al a hand up and they stood in the street, assessing. Those flames were six or eight feet high, high enough Sharon who lived above the hair salon had them at eye-view (and it scared her to death, I should say, so much so that she never lived above the ground floor again). And you would not believe how long it takes to burn up a whole tank of gasoline. The townspeople were going to be trapped here, far away from the school and any other locations the Whirlwinds might choose to attack, for a dangerously long time.

Buckaroo squinted into the roiling black smoke. "Destiny," he asked, "Is there a radio tower in town?"

"Just the one," said Destiny, swiping at the blood that ran down Al's neck, much to Al's dismay and irritation. "Mostly we get country stations out of Lubbock, same as shopping."

Al swatted her hand away. "Whatcha reckon, Buck?"

"I am reckoning," said Buckaroo, "that mind-control radio-waves have to come from a radio tower. And that unless Lubbock, Texas is a lot more dire than I think it is, that radio tower is right here in Floydada."

"Oh," interjected Anita behind them, hands on her Tabasco-smeared apron, "Lubbock really is that dire." Somebody had broken Anita's heart in Lubbock, which is why she said that. Don't go writing angry letters to me on account of her opinion of the place.

With a blink Al caught onto Buckaroo's way of thinking. "So if we knock out the tower --"

"Shazam," said Buckaroo, and snapped his fingers.

Destiny threw up her hands. "But that would be destroying school property!"

"Destroying it to save it," Buckaroo intoned, and with that decisive way of his he gave the fire his back and walked up the street towards the diner. Al took the opportunity to ask,

"But who in this town would do that? Mind-control, I mean."

"I don't know," said Destiny, with a frown. She had to trot to keep up with Al's lengthy stride, but all that cheerleading was good for something. "There's that weird freshman kid who's covered with pimples and watches Star Trek, but I don't think he's up to the job, if you know what I mean." 

"You mean," interrupted Buckaroo, as he spun on one heel, "it takes a truly evil mind to consider such a plan."

"Truly evil," Destiny repeated faintly. Buckaroo turned back toward the diner again, and Al followed him after a moment, but Destiny stayed where she was, and her face was starting to turn the color of her skirt. Which if you'll recall is a shade of green.

Buckaroo stood next to Deedee the Buick and reached up to untie his tricycle contraption from the roof. (Remember they lashed it up there when they'd headed out toward Floydada, that morning.) "What are you doing??" demanded Al.

"The radio tower is our primary objective," Buckaroo told him. He pulled the tricycle to the ground and began checking out its engine. "Somebody's got to get through that fire."

Al grabbed him by the shoulder. "What, you're going to just drive it on through? It'll blow up!"

"Number one," said Buckaroo, "it runs on cooking oil, and the flashpoint of canola oil is 600 Fahrenheit. And number two, I'm not going to _drive_ it."

Al went to hold him back, thinking he was saving the man's life, but Buckaroo Banzai is not a man to be held back. Also, he's got considerable skill at bushido. Because he liked Al, he didn't break his wrist, just flipped him over and left him gasping in the dust. Then he leapt onto the tricycle and gunned its tiny engine.

Now, I don't know what that tricycle was made of. I never saw it myself, for reasons that are about to be clear. But I know it was light enough two healthy young men could lift it onto the roof of a Buick easy as sneezing, and I know that when you let Buckaroo handle a blowtorch, he has been known to get artistic. So when I tell you that the contraption had a pair of wide decorations made out of sheet metal folded back on itself, one on either side, you'll understand that _probably_ Buckaroo added them on for fun, or to stabilize himself against that high Texas wind. But when he let go the brake and surged forward toward the wall of fire, well, something else happened.

He was head-down over the handlebars, and Al jumped up and chased after him a few steps, but off went Buckaroo with the little engine rattling and grumping like a hornet directly at the fire. The dust was high, and the smoke too, so for a few seconds in there nobody could tell it was happening, or could believe it. And then the wind changed directions and it was clear as well-water: that tricycle wobbled in its path, and wavered, and finally just a few yards away from certain death up came the front wheel and off it lifted.

My friends, with Buckaroo Banzai in the driver's seat, that tricycle could fly.

As you can imagine, Al just stood there watching with his mouth hanging open for a long, long time. Buckaroo floated over the line of fire and beyond, not too high, about even with the second stories of the buildings. Rawhide will swear to you, if you ask him, that he saw Buckaroo offer a salute to Sharon in her upper window.

"Ho-lee shit," said Al, that slow way he has.

"You ain't kidding," said Anita, and stared up into the sky.

They were a sight, those two. Her tinfoil helmet was askew and she'd lost one of her Hush Puppies. Al's shirt was bloody down almost to the waist, though the cuts were scabbing over by now. If you'd asked them that morning if they thought they could possibly knock a football team on its ass, they'd have laughed themselves silly. But they did it, without thinking it over too hard, and would do it again if Buckaroo Banzai asked them to.

When they could no longer see him from the street, Anita led the charge up to the roof of her diner (it was 45% hers, anyway), and ten people watched amazed on the hot black tarry roof as the silver tricycle glinted in the late-morning sun on its way towards the highschool. It really was a straight shot, and hard to miss the radio tower, which stuck up over the plain concrete school building like a steel candle on a birthday cake.

Radio waves are invisible, as I am sure you know. You can't just look at a tower and know that it is spewing messages of evil, or else the F.C.C. would have a much easier job of things. But with Buckaroo headed at it on his tiny improvised airplane, that little radio tower seemed like the very pinnacle of darkness. Even the cross-wind whistling through it sounded malicious.

Buckaroo fought that cross-wind and kept his craft in the air, and you could just barely see, if you had eagle-keen eyesight (which Rawhide does), when he pulled his tuning fork out of his pocket and wedged it against the steering column. So when he bailed out onto the gymnasium roof, rolling so neatly that he didn't even scuff the knees of his trousers, the little flying tricycle stayed on its same trajectory and glided forward for a direct hit on the radio tower.

Like I said, I don't know what that tricycle was made of. The radio tower was mostly aluminum, and like tinfoil it folded in half where it was hit, and crumpled to the ground in a shower of purple sparks. It was a spectacular sight, like a Roman candle in the daylight, and like nothing anybody -- even people who knew a little bit about radio -- had ever seen.

Down on the street, the remainder of the Whirlwinds dropped unconscious where they stood, which for the most part was in front of Effie von Dracken's house trying to break down the door, while Effie stood inside her front foyer in her housecoat shaking a broom at them. So to say that Effie was surprised, when nine strapping young samples of Floydada manhood wilted upon being called no-count mule-headed fools not worthy to lick her hubcaps clean, would be an understatement.

Well, all the rest was cleanup. Sheriff McClink made it back into town (he never did arrest either of the pumpkin-smashers, though he gave them both what-for), and he wanted to set up a quarantine and call the Rangers and I don't know what all, but his wife Maureen, considerably embarrassed at almost having shot the quarterback, talked him out of it. That little napkin Destiny had written up with all the players' names and addresses proved quite useful in organizing parties to go to each house, and make sure none of the boys had eaten their parents or their family pets. (Dodged a bullet, there.) The Rotary Club got itself together to round up those football players -- why do you think it's called the Rotary Club? It's in their charter that corralling mind-control mayhem outbreaks are the number one priority, in terms of community service -- and cleaned up Main Street before the sun went down that night. The poor Whirlwinds, when they woke up, did as they were told, baffled and penitent, big polite boys shuffling this way and that. 

"Move 'em on," Al called, taking one particularly large defensive end by the shoulders and directing him towards the iodine-and-bandages crew. "Move 'em on."

Buckaroo Banzai, who was ambling back up the street hands in pockets at this point (he had been whistling a certain theme song until that very moment, in fact), watched Al with a funny little glint in his eye. "What did you just say?"

"Well this is cattle country," Al intoned. "Long time back. There's traditions to uphold."

"Move 'em on," Buckaroo echoed, and then added, "Rawhide."

"Rawhide," said Al, and they busted out laughing together. They laughed so hard they wore themselves out and had to take a nap in Deedee's front seat while all the hubbub wound down. When they woke up at midafternoon, the First, Second and Third Baptist Churches in town had made up a potluck dinner for everybody -- thanks especially to Anita, who opened up her diner for general use that afternoon -- and they all sat down to eat. They didn't have any barbecue (Al noted, with some disdain), but you have to understand that to do barbecue right takes ten to twelve hours, and you don't delay celebrating your survival of the zombie apocalypse on account of macaroni and cheese not being good enough. Anyway, they had burgers and cornbread and Jello salad with Cool Whip and nobody complained at all.

At nightfall, Al -- who was already taking a liking to the name Rawhide -- and Buckaroo got into Deedee the Buick, and said goodbye to Floydada, Texas (population now 3,125, on account of the eaten principal), and drove off into the west. Destiny Figueroa watched them go, shielding her eyes against the setting sun, and swore that someday she'd head out too. And she did, by the way; she kept going west till she ended up in Bangladesh, where her expertise on whirlwinds (especially murderous ones) turned out to be very important.

As for the official history of the incident itself, it all got hushed up pretty quick, because eating up the principal of your highschool is as good a reason for a forfeit as I ever heard of, and the Whirlwinds may lose most every game, but they never have forfeited in the history of Floydada High School. They're called Whirlwinds for a reason, and that reason is the 1966 team bus having a close encounter with an F3 and a couple of not-inconsiderable trees, and they didn't forfeit _that_ game. So a mild case of the zombies was not going to ruin the string of games faithfully played.

It wasn't till years later that a certain member of the World Crime League and Hanoi Xan protege, named Mollycoddle O'Malley, was discovered to come originally from upper Texas. She is known to this day for her deadly accuracy with throwing knives and her interest in electromagnetic biochemical resonance. She can't have been more than eleven years old during the period of the Floydada Scuffle, and there is no record that she ever attended school in Floyd County, but well, we at the Banzai Institute don't believe in coincidences.

Rawhide and Buckaroo did make it to the deathplace of Dr. and Dr. Banzai, PhDs, and after that they took their time driving on to California and the embarkation point for Hong Kong. (They took the slow route, so Rawhide could have some time to get used to the idea of getting on an airplane. At that time, a kite or a flying tricycle were as close as he got to air travel, if you know what I mean.) And, well, the rest of this personnel file is like a biography of the Cavaliers, so I'll leave it off there. 

Because, as you can guess, Aloysius B. Searle was the first member of the band, Buckaroo's first bodyguard, chief developer of World Watch One, and the Vice President in Charge of Everything Else at the founding of the Banzai Institute. And to this day, his momma is secretary of the Blue Blaze Irregulars, Forth Worth chapter. She broadcasts him little notes on her shortwave about remembering to shine his shoes before he sees the President, and others in the network send the notes along till he gets them.

Oh, have no doubt: he is with us still. I can't tell you how because it's classified. Let's just say that it involved ice, giant industrial-sized rubber bands, a live octopus, and the most brilliant neurosurgeon of his generation. And New Jersey helped.

Come on. Buckaroo Banzai isn't going to let a little thing like death get in between him and his right hand man, is he? There's nobody else on the bus who knows the secret of Grandma Myrtle's barbecue. Which is delicious, by the way.

 


End file.
